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Happy Halloween: Can we excavate witches?

Painting of a witch by John William Waterhouse 1886, via Wikimedia Commons

In honor of Halloween, I was going to post something about the new morbid terminology- necropants. However, this is a site about bones, burials, and bodies- so I’ll let you read that at Huffington Post. For Halloween, we’re going to be exploring the burials of witches. Like many other of the ‘deviant’ burials we’ve discussed here like vampires and aliens, the main thing to keep in mind is that we’re not arguing that these individuals are true evidence of the supernatural, rather that the burying population perceived them to have some type of superhuman power in life or in death. On that note- can we excavate evidence of witchcraft and witches?

In Summer 2011, archaeologists found the remains of an individual they believe to be a witch. The burial dates to the 13th century, and was found in Piombino near Lucca in Italy’s Tuscany region. The cemetery supposedly belongs to a ‘witches graveyard’ due to the finding of two females who are thought to be witches. Both burials were in shallow graves without a coffin or shroud, and both women are aged from 25 to 30 years. The first burial belonged to a female who was found with 17 dice. Since women were forbidden from gambling and playing dice 800 years ago, it is an anomalous find that has some meaning. To make it more meaningful, 17 is also an unlucky number. The second burial was even more rare- the mouth of the female had seven nails in her mouth, and 13 more nails around the skeleton. Whether or not these were ‘driven’ into the jaw or simply placed in the mouth at burial is not known (though the popular news would seem to support the latter).

The ‘Witch’ with the nails in her mouth, via Daily Mail

Based on the type of burial, the archaeologists suspected that the women were buried as witches. He thinks that the nails found around the body were hammered into the women’s clothing in order to pin her down into the grave. He argued that it was done in order to prevent the deceased from rising from the dead. However, they were buried in the consecrated grounds of a church. In this era, deviant burials are often excluded from the normal cemetery and found at alternative locations like execution mound cemeteries. The archaeologists argue that perhaps these were affluent women, and were able to secure a consecrated burial despite the fear of them.

Are these witches or not? Are they possibly adulterers or prostitutes? Kristina Killgrove talks about this belief (which isn’t mentioned in the Daily Mail version of the post), and the evidence may point to this identity. First, dice are a sign of immorality and could point to the individual’s immorality as a prostitute. Second, there is evidence that nails in the mouth was done as a punishment for adulterers.

Another possible ‘witch’ burial was found during an excavation of the Newton Plantation in Barbados. The burial dates to the late 17th or early 18th century. The young adult female was buried in an artificial mound without grave goods or a coffin. However, the individual was buried face down. We do not have much ethnographic or historical evidence for how these witches would have been buried, but we do know that there was a real sense of fear about witchcraft and the belief did exist. One important piece of evidence was that she had lead poisoning, which would have caused seizures, convulsions, or paralysis very suddenly, and this may have been interpreted as related to supernatural power.

One interesting mystery is what happened to the burials of the Salem Witch Trials? In the first few cases we discussed burials of individuals who may be witches due to the circumstances of the burials. We don’t have any text or ethnographic evidence that those previous burials themselves are definitely witches. The reverse of this is the Salem Witch trials where we have text and ethnography to support that witchcraft happened, but we lack the archaeology or burials. 20 peoples were killed as witches, but there are no known burials. They would not have been buried in the consecrated church grounds due to the manner of their death. It is thought that they were buried in unmarked graves at their respective family cemeteries- but the truth it not known.

Katy is currently a graduate student studying mortuary archaeology at Michigan State University. Her academic interests are in mortuary and bioarchaeology, with a specific interest in connecting the physical remains to the mortuary context. Along with this, she is also interested in Digital Humanities, and the integration of technology into academia, as well as public archaeology and outreach.